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Mistletoe State Park officials expect 5,000 to 6,000 guests to come through their gates this week for family-friendly Fourth of July events.

Nearly all of the park’s 92 campsites have been rented for the week, while an estimated 800 people will fill the park’s picnic shelter, beach house and group shelter, said Program Assistant Brenda Bettross.

When a patient goes into cardiac arrest, CPR provides the steady circulation needed to supply oxygen to the heart and brain. But CPR often proves taxing on even trained medics during a long, jostling ride in the back of an ambulance.

A community youth choir soon will perform in one of the nation’s most prestigious concert venues.

The Augusta Youth Chorale left for Washington, D.C., this week to perform Monday in the National Cathedral as the featured choir for the 2012 Nation’s Capital Festival of Youth Choirs, said chorale Director Mark Nabholz.

Though the group never previously performed at the festival, they received an invitation to sing as the featured choir because they are a community choir, Nabholz said.

Columbia County authorities arrested a man who they say robbed a Martinez bank Thursday morning.

Ted Howard Screws, 44, of Sally Drive in Martinez, was charged Thursday evening with armed robbery and is being held at the Columbia County Detention Center without bond, said Columbia County Sheriff’s Capt. Steve Morris in an email.

Investigators say Screws is the man who walked into First Bank of Georgia on Furys Ferry Road at about 10 a.m. and handed the bank teller a note and a homemade device, Morris said.

A Grovetown City Councilman accused of bribery in Alabama spoke out Thursday about the federal charges against him.

Leland J. “Sonny” McDowell, who pled not guilty to the charges on June 15, is accused of offering a kickback to a former Alabama Department of Public Safety employee in 2007.

“I am not guilty,” McDowell said. “I intend to defend myself through this process with everything that I have. ... I have tremendous confidence in this country’s justice system for the most part. I’m going to defend myself and I fully expect, at the end of this, to be cleared.”

Columbia County investigators are looking for a man who robbed an Evans gas station early Tuesday.

Just after midnight, a man wearing a hooded jacket with a scarf over his face walked into the TPS station on Washington Road at William Few Parkway and pointed a pistol at the clerk, according to a Columbia County Sheriff’s Office report.

The man took cash and cigarettes, and then ran from the store. He last was seen headed south on William Few Parkway. Neither the clerk nor a customer in the store were harmed during the holdup.